BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

I am not sure who that 60% rate applies to. The kid who earns a few bucks mowing lawns for neighbors?

Seems to me it's often the parents' established belief systems that teachers have to worry about, not the kids'.

Nobody pays 60% of their income as income tax but if you have a high income you will get close to paying 60% marginally, i.e. if your tax due is f(x) where x is income, then df/dx(X) where X is your income will be close to 0.6. This will be the case if earn more than 311.000 kroner/year after deductions and you live in a high-tax municipilaty. For lower incomes the margina tax is typically 39%, and 45% for intermediate incomes. Very low incomes like that of your lawn-mowing kids are not taxed.

Imagine a national referendum on whether everyone's income will be taxed at the rate of 60%. What are the chances of passage?

This is along the lines i would have expected. Krugman's formulation was very careless, I read his words as a 60% tax rate, period. It seemed weird, but not living there I didn't know. He might have said "a top tax rate of 60%" or, even better, "a top marginal tax rate of 60%".

To pay for these programs, Denmark collects a lot of taxes. The top income tax rate is 60.3 percent; there’s also a 25 percent national sales tax. Overall, Denmark’s tax take is almost half of national income, compared with 25 percent in the United States.

The crucial difference is that the Europeans trust and rely on their governments to take care of the things that are in (almost) everybody's interest. And Americans don't.

Indeed, carelessness is not good. Here's what Krugman actually wrote:


But, as Helene pointed out, the Danes receive a lot in return for those taxes that folks in the USA either pay for themselves or miss out on entirely. And the point is that there is no reason to fear that the economy will collapse because of higher taxes, provided that those taxes provide real benefits to the citizens.

Fox News is claiming that Biden is going to enter the race? This seems ridiculous. I find it really hard to believe that Biden is this delusional.

Other than dead relatives, I find it difficult to understand what he is planning to campaign on...

I don't want to sound like an anti-American bigot or an anti-democratic (small or large D) weirdo, but what % of people who actually vote for president regularly read Krugman? What % of those people will have their vote change from Sanders to Trump or Jeb based on this presumed flat tax questions?

Weren't the last 7 years a success?

Other than dead relatives, I find it difficult to understand what he is planning to campaign on...

Moreover, I believe that Biden was a good to great VP.

Hey, look at that...

Biden announced that he isn't running.

That's a good choice and good for the Democratic party, not because Biden would not be a viable candidate but because he would be a viable candidate, and this is not the time to create dissent within the party.

If not now, when?

Is your objective to ram Democrat ideology down the throats of the citizenry, or to prevent the Republicans from ramming their ideology down our throats?

Ben Franklin, when asked by a neighbor "what kind of government have you given us, Mr. Franklin?" is alleged to have replied "a Republic, madam. If you can keep it." IMO the experiment is failing, if it hasn't already failed.

Eric Schmidt, the tech billionaire who is now the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, started investing in a political technology startup over a year ago. Now the company, Groundwork, is a key player in the Clinton campaign’s digital strategy. This Quartz piece takes you inside that somewhat secretive effort. -- Nick Corasaniti, NYT Politics Reporter

Are startups the new Super PACs?

Today, corporations and wealthy donors have many ways to seek influence with politicians. While their donations to campaigns are limited to a maximum of $5,000 or hundreds of thousands to national party committees, they can also now set up Super PACs with unlimited money for political activities, so long as they don’t coordinate with the official campaigns.

That unlimited money is all well and good for many things a campaign needs—TV advertising, for example, and even field work. But if you want to help make a campaign more tech-savvy, it gets harder: a super PAC, nominally independent under byzantine campaign finance laws, can’t pay for tech infrastructure.

That’s the beauty of the Groundwork: Instead of putting money behind a Super PAC that can’t coordinate with the campaign, a well-connected donor like Schmidt can fund a startup to do top-grade work for a campaign, with the financial outlay structured as an investment, not a donation.

Schmidt, a major political donor, did not give money to Clinton’s campaign in the first half of this year, though a campaign official says he has visited the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters and is supportive of her candidacy.

With tech policy an increasingly important part of the president’s job—consider merely the issues of NSA surveillance and anti-trust policy, not to mention self-driving cars and military robots—helping to elect yet another president could be incredibly valuable to Schmidt and to Google.

And Schmidt’s largesse is not something that other candidates, either rival Democrats like Bernie Sanders or the crowded field of Republicans, will be able to easily match. The billionaire Alphabet executive chairman now boasts a growing track record for funding politically-minded tech startups. The jobs these create could make it easier to attract top engineers to political work without asking them to sacrifice pay and equity for a brief campaign sabbatical.